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David Breuer-Weil was born in London in 1965 and grew up in North London. His father, born in Vienna in 1938, fled Nazi-occupied Vienna with his parents as a small child after the Anschluss. The family were lucky to have found visas into England at this late date. His mother was born in Copenhagen and left for England in the early 1960s. Her father had been killed by the Nazis besides Holte Lake (Furesoe) in 1944. This lake has provided the inspiration for several of Breuer-Weil most beautiful landscapes. From an early age he was privy to discussions about the traumas of the earlier generation, and these were a clear influence on his artistic vision in later years. Breuer-Weil attended Jewish preparatory and secondary schools, where the emphasis on art was fairly minimal, but he had plenty of inspiration at home from his father, a successful sculptor, painter and jewellery designer who encouraged his talent from an early age. After winning a number of competitions, Breuer-Weil went to the Central Saint Martin’s School of Art in 1985, where he studied under Shelley Faussett, one of Henry Moore’s chief assistants. Later he went to Clare College, Cambridge University where he soon became involved with fringe theatrical and artistic groups. After Cambridge he was awarded a bursary at Sotheby’s and he spent the next year training in different artistic departments and disciplines, starting with Old Master Paintings and ending in the Impressionist and Modern Art Department. In the Evening Standard, which featured one of his early large-scale paintings in 1991, he described Sotheby’s as “the greatest art school in the world”, and there is little doubt that the years he spent in direct physical contact with works by the masters of the past enhanced his knowledge of both technique and his own artistic direction. During this period he combined working for an auction house with his own artistic practise. Over the next few years he created a large body of small-scale “Neracian” works on paper, many of these were so small that they are stored in stamp albums. It was also during this period that he developed the personal iconography that would culminate in the Project some years later. Breuer-Weil had already conceived of the idea of painting the Project as early as 1989, but it took him several years to achieve this vision in reality, although around that time he painted a series of four or five monumental figural compositions which hinted at the works that would follow almost a decade later. These were exhibited at Sotheby’s in 1991. However, the pressures of work soon made this early start on the Project an isolated burst of his monumental ambitions. From 1991 till 1994 he lived in Ramat Efal, Israel, and worked at Sotheby’s in Tel-Aviv both as a Judaica and picture expert. Whilst in Israel he experimented with different styles, but the radiance of the light and local colours gave birth to a series of landscapes and abstractions that were painted in primary colours and were exhibited at the Engel Gallery in Tel Aviv in 1993. 1994 and 1995. In 1994 he started using these colours in conjunction with the more personal figural imagery he had developed over many years in his small, stamp-sized works on paper-his Neracian works. During this period, from 1994-1995 he painted a large series of these brightly coloured works. But their cheerful colours masked the deeply serious imagery of many of these works, as Judith Glass, reviewing the artist’s November 1994 exhibition at the Boundary Gallery in 1994 observed: “The titles may conjure up scenes of domestic charm, but this is a compendium of Freudian allegory and interpretation” (November 18, 1994). From 1995-6 he developed this imagery further in a series of brightly coloured oils. During this time he was dividing his time between Israel and London, and many of these pieces use the imagery of layers that become increasingly prevalent in later works. But here the layers seem to represent the aspect of living in two physical locations simultaneously. He started to exhibit a great deal both in London and Tel Aviv and had a number of successful one-person exhibitions at the Boundary Gallery in London and at the Engel Gallery in Tel Aviv. Collectors began to acquire his distinctive works internationally and his art often appeared in the press. Some of the paintings of this time such as “Bomb Head” are clearly political in the sense that they encapsulate some of the prevalent problems of the time, in this case the increase of terrorism.
In the summer of 1996 two important new developments took place. He was now working again in the Impressionist and Modern Art Department at Sotheby’s New Bond Street. At the same time he started to plan the physical realisation of the Project. In the evenings he worked on massive canvases based on recent drawings. After executing seven or eight of these (which were never exhibited except for one, “The Staircase”, (at Sotheby’s in 1996) he reduced the scale, and worked on canvases measuring not more than two metres in length. These became the early works for Project 1. Some of these early attempts display the playful, even naïve charm of the 1994-6 gouaches. But by 1997 their colours and sense of gravitas became notably more intense, primarily under the influence of the remarkable new group of highly finished pencil drawings that he first embarked upon at the time. The period 1997-2001 marked the first intensive period of Project painting, and culminated in the exhibition Project at the Roundhouse in Camden Town, an exhibition for which he was hailed by John Russell Taylor of the Times as a “colossal talent” . In 1997 Breuer-Weil left Sotheby’s, but his time working as an art expert was not over. He became a consultant expert for the Swiss Art dealership de Pury and Luxembourg Art . This new position allowed him far more time to pursue his own painting, and the results were immediately clear. The work became richer, more considered, and much more disturbing in content and tone. “Simon de Pury was very much into cutting edge contemporary art and as I was working with him I was exposed to new currents in art on a daily basis. I shared certain pre-occupations with some of the artists, notably Hirst, Gober and Tuymans. It seemed possible to make beautiful art out of an essentially damaged world-view, a world-view influenced by human history, mortality, even evil. But I did not want to do it in a throwaway or photographic manner. I wanted to produce art that encountered, absorbed and immortalised these themes through the more conventional medium of paint and visual symbol. But that is of course no easy task. I was also very, very critical of the way in which contemporary art often seemed to be reduced to the status of mere commodity. I expected and still do expect art to be a great deal more than that. It is a spiritual tool of the greatest power, not merely another kind of bond. In my own work I consciously eschewed the high polish, commercial, slick look of much of the art of the era. I wanted to produce colossal, un-commercialized images of existential doubt. A lot of my work of that period was definitely painted as a violent response to that world (for example the 1999 drawing “Dealer”, which depicts a head covered entirely in dollar notes). And I believe that my sense of opposition fed into the power of my work”. In more recent years the museums have begun take a strong interest in Breuer-Weil’s work, recognising the iconic and extremely relevant nature of much of his imagery. In 2005 he exhibited with Chris Ofili at “Closing the Door? Immigrants to Britain 1905-2005”, a topical exhibition on immigration to Britain to mark the centenary of the Aliens Act that was held at the Jewish Museum, London, and in 2007 The Ben Uri Gallery, the London Jewish Museum of Art, exhibited Project 3 to considerable acclaim, recognising its uniqueness and significant contribution to the history of British and international figurative painting.
From 2007 to 2011 Breuer-Weil produced Project 4. To date Breuer-Weil has held back this series of over 80 paintings and 200 drawings from exhibition. This was a period of extensive travel for the artist, and he spent significant amounts of time in New York, Tel-Aviv, Paris and Italy. In 2007-8 he executed and exhibited the Vogue Landscapes and in 2009 he painted the group of massive vertical images of women titled “Anorexic Babes” shown at the Hayek Centre of Contemporary Art in Tel-Aviv. Over the last few years several paintings by Breuer-Weil have appeared on the secondary market at Sotheby’s, Christies, Phillips de Pury and Bonhams. In 2010 he returned to sculpture, producing new bronzes, four of which were exhibited in January 2011 with works by Epstein and Moore at “The Human Figure in British Sculpture”, at the Boundary Gallery, to coincide with the Royal Academy exhibition “Modern British Sculpture”. In 2010, his most ambitious sculpture to date, “Visitor” was exhibited at Sotheby’s Chatsworth “Beyond Limits” with works by Ron Arad, Marc Quinn, Damien Hirst and other leading sculptors.
Breuer-Weil currently lives and works in London.
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